icodein / term_emu_poc

A proof of concept "proxy" terminal emulator

Terminal Emulator Proof-of-Concept

About

This is a proof-of-concept terminal emulator. It is used to illustrate how other "proxy" terminal emulators (i.e. those which run further terminal emulator programs, such as tmux and ssh) operate.

This project simply renders the "sub"-terminal with a single-character border, which can be changed using ^D. Note that this means that the terminal can't be exited in this way, and so exit or a similar mechanism must be used.

Usage

This project can be built with Rust using cargo build, or it can be built with Docker using bash build.sh. Both will build the binary to target/debug/tep, which can be run directly.

Operation

This program is essentially the internal components of Alacritty (primarily, its terminal parser implementation and its PTY spawner) re-targeted to run on the command-line instead of in a GUI. It uses pancurses for rendering to the command-line.